Civil Resilience

What would change this

• Does the western water system get through a second dry winter?Variable — reservoir storage in the western catchments through the January-to-April dry season, and whether staged restrictions are imposed. Observable — Water Resources Agency storage reporting and rationing announcements; completion of the remaining inter-basin pipeline projects (ten of sixteen were incomplete in June 2026) and of the Hsinchu and Tainan desalination plants. Why it matters — the 2026 response held because transfer infrastructure existed; whether it holds again is a test of the programme rather than of the weather.

What would change this

• Does the pharmaceutical resilience programme move from plan to budget?Variables — passage of the NT$24bn 2026–29 appropriation through the Legislative Yuan, and the domestic share of active pharmaceutical ingredients against a baseline near 16 per cent. Observable — budget votes, MOHW and MOEA programme reporting, and the count of critical drugs brought into domestic production against a stated target of 50. Why it matters — an announced programme whose appropriation has not passed changes nothing about supply.

What would change this

• Do gas holdings track the stepping requirement, or lag it?Variable — reported days of gas cover against the requirement schedule (11 days in 2025, 14 in 2027) and the storage-capacity schedule (20 days in 2025, 24 in 2027). Observable — ministerial statements to the Legislative Yuan, MOEA Energy Administration publications, and completion of new storage capacity. Watch each fuel against its own target rather than in aggregate; gas is the binding case because it has the shortest cover and cannot be warehoused. Why it matters — the gap between a requirement and a holding is the only part of energy exposure that is publicly measurable at all.
• Does any reactor restart move from filing to regulatory decision?Variable — the status of restart applications before the Nuclear Safety Commission. Observable — a docketed regulatory decision, not a political statement or a referendum result. Direction that would matter — approval with a construction and fuel timeline attached. Why it matters — nuclear generation has been zero since May 2025; on published timelines no restart is possible before roughly 2028, so anything sooner would mean the timeline itself had changed.

What would change this

• Are cable incidents outpacing repair capacity and redundancy?Variables — annual incident count against the four-year average of seven to eight; time to restoration; and the share of incidents in which a cause is legally established. Observable — MODA's annual damage analysis, prosecutions, and regional cable-ship availability. Why it matters — restoration time is set by vessel availability rather than by repair difficulty, so the constraint sits outside Taiwan entirely. Attribution is treated cautiously in every case, and an unresolved incident is recorded as unresolved.
• How much backup capacity is actually in service, as against announced?Variable — satellite and microwave capacity carrying live traffic, and the number of non-geostationary terminals operating rather than sited. Observable — MODA and NCC reporting, new inter-island cable completions, and carrier participation in regional systems. Why it matters — redundancy is not immunity: every backup path is materially lower capacity than the cable it stands in for, and only capacity in service changes an exposure.
• Does public warning stop depending on the paths a crisis would remove?Variable — whether alert content is self-sufficient on cell broadcast and SMS alone. Observable — the design of alerts issued in the next urban-resilience cycle, after the August 2026 drills sent recipients to look up guidance online while data was throttled. Why it matters — this is the one exercise finding on this surface that identified a concrete, fixable design fault rather than a capability question, so whether it is fixed is a direct test of whether exercises feed back into policy.

What would change this

• Do arrivals or war-risk terms change before anything else does?Variables — vessel calls and cargo throughput at the western ports, and whether Taiwan or its approaches appear in the Joint War Committee's Listed Areas. Observable — Taiwan International Ports Corporation throughput reporting, and the Listed Areas themselves, which are published and binary. Why it matters — commercial behaviour moves before a physical constraint does; insurance listing and sailing decisions are the earliest civilian-visible indicators on this surface, and they are observable without any access to what either government intends.

What would change this

• Is measured public confidence holding as the foundation the rest rests on?Variables — polling series on confidence in institutions, in the armed forces, and in the reliability of external support; and personal-preparedness measures. Observable — established academic and polling series with published methods, read as trend lines rather than as single readings. Why it matters — it is the declared target of sustained information pressure and the input every other resilience measure assumes. A change in the trend would not by itself establish that an information operation caused it, and this question does not treat it as such.

What would change this

• Do civil-defence programmes convert into demonstrated capability?Variables — reserve training delivered against the 14-day standard, the duty-alignment rate against the reported 93 per cent, local-government participation in urban-resilience drills, and public preparedness survey results. Observable — MND reporting to the Legislative Yuan, exercise after-action publication, and ADMA programme documents. Why it matters — announcement is not delivery and an exercise objective is not a demonstrated outcome; this question exists to keep those apart rather than to score them.